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Label:This painting was completed in the summer or early autumn of 1912 at Les Clochettes, a villa that Picasso rented in Sorgues, near Avignon, in the south of France. It was later included in the first Surrealist exhibition, which took place at Galerie Pierre Loeb in Paris in November 1925. It is not known if Picasso had any say in the selection of this work, but André Breton, the French poet and Surrealist leader, greatly admired the visual ambiguities of Picasso's Cubist paintings, which by the following decade had lost none of their power to shock and bewilder the public.

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Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections

The Cubist language that Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque developed redefined the concept of painterly realism. Every picture confirms the Picasso's insistence that his images were always grounded in reality and never conceived as abstract combinations of pictorial elements. The subject of this painting, for example, can be deciphered by situating the identifiable elements relative to one another within the rigorously shallow space of the composition, its volumes flattened into a scaffold-like system of lines and softly modeled planes. The vertical canvas refers the viewer to the traditional format for portraiture. The ivory trapezoid at upper center suggests a face, although all features are absent. Recognition of the guitar is aided by Picasso's familiar visual shorthand for the instrument: the key at its upper neck, the shaded arc of the sound hole, the vertical lines of the strings. The most recognizable element in the composition--the dish containing a swirled dessert--adds an unusual note of bright color to the relatively somber Cubist palette. Ann Temkin, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 308.